Is there any closed source android app that you wish had a good open source alternative?

federino@programming.dev to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 207 points –

I'm currently looking to develop an open source app that can help somebody. I'm currently out of ideas, so I'd like to heard if from you guys.

Sorry if it seems to lazy to ask for ideas like that, I just thought that I could do it since the result will be a free app.

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It would be a huge undertaking, but a Fitness and Health tracker / aggregator that could replace Google Fit and the likes.

I really can't bear how Google, Apple, Samsung, and all these big companies are the primary holders of our most intimate information. I've put some measures in place to limit who gets what, but it would be a huge boon to be the sole maintainer of my own info.

The problem is that the various apps and devices which report data won't immediately support syncing with a FOSS upstart...

The app I use for grabbing my weight and BMI can only sync with a few other apps. The app I use for calorie and diet tracking can likewise only sync with a few apps. They happen to have Google fit in common, so I use that as an intermediary to transfer weight to the calorie/diet app. All my steps, exercise, and sleep stay in Zepp, separate from them all.

It sure would be nice to have one service/application to rule them all and a secure method of storing one's own personal information without having to give it to the tech companies. Sure, use one of the many cloud services but encrypt all the data so that they can't steal it. Yadda yadda.

One can dream.

I develop a self-hosted service designed to do exactly this! It's not quite finished yet, but it's at the point where enough functionality works that it can be used for testing.

https://github.com/connervieira/HealthBox

The docs/USAGE.md file gives an overview of how HealthBox works. Feel free to poke around in the other docs/ files as well.

More than once I've wondered if I can make something look like google fit to other apps, obviously would have to be on a degoogled rom, which limits its utility for a wider audience.

the devices would have to be degoogled so that the app can gather the necessary information? I never used google fit, so I don't know how it works nor how it gathers the user information.

My thinking runs: is it possible to implement the APIs that are called to use google fit, assuming they run through google play services or something

would probably never happen considering how hippa compliance and privacy

Obsidian.

Markor is a great open source markdown editor for android, but I wish we had some decent WYSIWYG options, like obsidian, typora, etc.

Doesn't have exactly the same features but I've simply been using Logseq syncing my notes with Syncthing

Joplin already does a great job for this, at least for notes.

I used Joplin extensively for ~2 years, but I was constantly put off by the desktop applications UI and how my notes was stored in SQLite. The move to obsidian felt natural and I felt more in ownership over my files in their existing structure. Granted, obsidian is closed source and could go rogue, but when that happens, I am prepared to jump ship without too much pain.

Exactly. Not a huge fan of notes apps storing the data in a db.otherwise there is a lot to like about joplin. With obsidian i open my notes in codium all the time to make mass edits or fill gaps that obsidians UI cant meet, which is not possible with joplin.

Fortunately with obsidian as long as you keep the plugins on the lighter side and keep any non-markdown content in seperate files via linking, im not too worried about having to jump ship if it ever goes bad. Worst case if a plugin dies or i have to migrate, the actual loss of data is that some plugin used json or whatever and it'd have to be converted or replaced.

I do have hope at least that if the company folds they'll open source it, or turn a blind eye to a community reengineering effort. And what is unique about obsidian markdown and metadata will probably get community-built migration tools quickly if enough people jump ship en masse.

But for the time being Obsidian is the best option for me and i dont feel that bad about it.

I don't see the hate for storing data in a sqlite database. It's still your data, you get to do with it as you please, and I've yet to see the data encrypted (let's not give anyone any silly ideas here). You want to see your data outside of the program, just download any sqlite viewer. If you don't mind CLI, then the tools provided by sqlite are more than good enough and are only a few MB in size.

Generally speaking I'm not opposed to sqlite. The case of a notes app is the one exception.

If i need to make a big find and replace change, i dont need to rely on the app to have the capability or whip out a sql editor or cli tool. I just open my favorite text editor and do it. Or chain some cli tools built into the os.

Its not even about data portability or export. Its about working with the data.

I think it has more to do with preference than hate. For me particularly, I don't care much about how things are stored. I just make sure to exporr/backup regularly, and if anything breaks, it's an easy and mostly painless fix.

I tried Obsidian once, and while I did like it and the UI is light years ahead of Joplin, I guess I'm just used to the Joplin experience, so I saw no need to switch.

I used Joplin for up to 8 hours daily for half a year (university) before switching to Obsidian, too. As far as I know, Joplin lets you store the notes as files, too, but you need to set it up that way from the start.

Still, I found Obsidian to be much more pleasant and - ironically - easier to modify (by writing plugins) than Joplin.

IMO Obsidian is already a little rogue, in the sense that it only supports their sync. I know you can glue something together by syncing the folder itself, but that's not convenient or the point. For now I'll stick with Joplin because it works with nextcloud nicely.

There is at least plugins that enables sync by alternative ways. They're not as elegant, but work.

Since everything, including settings, is stored in the same root folder as the notes - you can sync your settings along your notes through other tools too.

I am not an excessive note-taking guy, but I am using Notesnook for some time now and it does everything I needed so far.

Seems okay, but doesn't allow editing of local files / folders, it wants you to use their paid sync service. Also its javascript / electron, not native android.

One of those "smart" alarms that monitor and graph your sleep. E.g movement, sounds, snorings, sleep talking etc.

At a minimum one that wakes you up in the 30 minute window of your lightest sleep phase

I paid for AMdroid because I can set profiles, Geo fence, have math problems to turn off alarms, fade in music, turn on my flashlight... All the bells and whistles. I would love a FOSS version, but many try to be single feature. I like all the things.

SleepAsAnAndroid as well a broad support for generic smart watches

broad support for generic smart watches

Gadgetbridge is pretty well on it's way to this. They roll out support for new devices monthly it seems like. Of course there are always feature X and Y that fitbit or garmin does that it doesn't, but it's quite an impressive project. I use it with a pebble 2 HR.

I built an open source app a while back that had some similar functionality to sleep as android called "Go to Sleep". Haven't updated it for a long time, always wanted to add more things

My banking apps. They are the only reason I can't fully de-google myself.

My philosophy is if I can use a web page for it, I won't install an app (couple of exceptions, but a good rule). Less convenient, more secure.

As KMFDM have it, "Those who sacrifice liberty for security Deserve neither and will lose both"

Unfortunately in some countries web banking apps are not allowed afaik. Very good answer though

My bank uses the app to auth logins to website bank.

So, if you don't have an Apple/Android device (and the app installed), you just can't use web-banking? That's pretty crazy!

yes, that is pretty much it. all actions, including logins need to be done with 2-factor authentication, which means Google Play Store.

God, you know what I really wish I could do?
Run an Android VM on my phone. Imagine being able to do whatever you want with your device and still having a "stock" device for those pesky apps without having to actually have two phones.

It is seemingly possible, but the only app I've ever seen do it was "VMOS": a proprietary app, impossible to trust.

I'm running Android apps on my laptop using Waydroid. Works really well

You usually want to use banking apps when you are away from home though.

Nova launcher - there isn't a good one for one FOSS replacement. Every launcher I tried from fdroid has at least one shortcoming (if not more).

Agreed. Yet to find a true replacement

I'm making do with pear launcher. Only thing I'm sad about off the top of my head is you can't change the padding on widgets to fit whole screen.

It currently has a rating of 4.1. It looks like it has some bugs and some cause it to crash.

Everyone I've tried from the Play store feels too basic compared to Nova or their rating is too low because of bugs.

Edit: in hindsight it looks like I'm a paid shill for Nova. This isn't the case at all. I've been looking at launchers for the past few weeks as I recently realised I've had the same set up style for over a decade. I don't want to be the person stuck in the past doing stuff the slower and archaic ways when there are newer and better ways of doing things. I currently have over 20 launchers installed on my phone and I've been slowly trying some.

It's a little strange, but I'm enjoying Pie Launcher

It currently has a rating of 3.6. It looks like it has issues and lacks customisation.

I don't think you found the vorrect one. I guess the one they are reffering to is made by Markus Fisch. It is also available on Fdroid

Why do you believe I haven't found the correct one?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.markusfisch.android.pielauncher

Edit: I'm looking at the Play store since F-Droid doesn't have ratings or feedback. I look for apps on the Play store, find something interesting, and then look for the F-Droid version.

I feel like you should just download the apps and test them yourself instead of only going by ratings. These are free apps, and it takes a few minutes to see if something has the feature or feel you want. Once you uninstall a launcher, android goes back to the previous with all its configurations as it was, so you don't need to risk your previous setup. Just a suggestion of what I do, because I find that for something as particular as a phone launcher, ratings are often incomplete information.

It doesn't have any rating (or maybe it just doesn't show them to me) and you said that it has a rating of 3.6. There is another app called the same that has rating of 3.7

The Play store link I provided doesn't show a rating to you?

no, it might be because there aren't any reviews in my language. But they could still show the star count, weird

How strange. You would think the star rating would always show regardless of regional settings and you would think reviews are also shown but with a translate button next to each review given that's not the same as what's set in your regional settings - the same as on Google Maps.

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Yeah, Hyperion is the closest I've found. Also what I'm currently using

Doesn't look like Hyperion is open source :(

Until there's a FOSS version of Nova, I guess I'll keep using Nova and have my firewall block its outgoing traffic.

It currently has a rating of 3.7. It looks like it has a lot of bugs.

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Discord. I hate that premium costs so much and all the ads they put in place to sell useless junk features.

Google maps. So open street maps but with reviews like maps has. A few days ago people suggested apps, but they lack reviews. I disagree that they are useless.

Discord needs to die in a fire, so much knowledge lost... But their momentum is something awful.

Discord has an alternative called Revolt that is open source. It has all the premium features in discord for free, but is still in early stages I'd say.

even if alternatives existed it would still be a hassle to convert friends to it unless it is better in every way.

I use Mumble + XMPP with an IRC gateway to cover everything voice & chat related …but there are plenty of options to replace Discord, you just need to let folks know you don’t want an ad-filled proprietary experience & that you wish to be contacted in a manner where your privacy is a priority.

Google’s reviews have a lot of junk in them except the ones stating business closed/moved (OSM you can literally delete or move the POI, but less users). The integrated crowd-sourced images of establishments however is missing which makes it hard to understand POI in comparison—a picture is worth a thousand words.

Matrix?

Alternative messenger exist, I should've been more precise. At this point an alternative would require at least the same features than discord, to get people away from it. I don't see that happen.

complete feature parity isn't a good goal, or the alternatives will always be behind. Partial parity, with some features Discord doesn't have (e.g. E2EE) is an achievable goal which does successfully encourage migration

I would just love it if I had the bus routes for my city readily available in open street maps, like how goog|e maps does it. I think goog|e maps might be my answer to the question if I can't find anything worse.

Speaking of reviews, aren't there special review websites in most of the countries?

It's about a quick glance on a location and reading some reviews quickly. There is a workaround with open street maps integrating google reviews but it's again relying on google at this point.

Well if openstreetmaps implemented the same thing it would be useless because there are not many people using it

It would grow. Just to have the ability would be nice. A lot of people also would start to write reviews to be the first etc. We got to start somewhere, same as with the Fediverse. We could even combine it.

Yea having the ability would be nice. I'm not sure it's possible to implement without sacrificing privacy though

A really good launcher!

Also, weather app!

I do find Breezy Weather quite nice ;)

Been using Breezy for awhile after seeing it recommended here on Lenny. I like it, but I do wish I could easily search for a location without having it added to my list of Saved locations.

KISS launcher on minimal mode with nice icons and a geometric weather widget for me. Been rocking it for years and its amazing

Every time I pivot away from Trebuchet, I always pivot back. It does what I want; app folders, hidden apps, multiple screens, widgets.

All the alternatives sacrifice something

It's a bit unorthodox but I use Pie Launcher from F-Droid.

As for weather, I use RadarWeather (also from f-droid)

I can't really think of anything now because Android FOSS apps ecosystem is really good. What I want to suggest is contributing to already existing projects sometimes. It's faster and just another thing you can do to help open-source ecosystems

Yes, I don't think I have another app but more features on some apps I use (Smartdock, Joplin, Librera, Rimusic) would be slightly life-changing.

Google lens.

I love point and translate. Faster more pin pointed reverse image search is cool too.

Right now im looking for an alternative to the Google Maps Timeline. I know there is OwnTracks but I dont think that everything has to be hosted on a server somewhere (especially when all its saving is a timestamp and a coordinate, its not like that takes up alot of space)

Basically just your own location tracker and then the option to see your own history displayed in a map e.g. where you have been on the 02.july.2019 at 11:50.

I know there is OwnTracks but I dont think that everything has to be hosted on a server somewhere

Google Maps Timeline is also hosted on a server somewhere.

OsmAnd has a track recording feature.

Yeah obviously Google hosts this as a Services because it want your location data. But if I'm the only one who sees that data, I think it'd fine if it stays on my phone.

And I am especially not looking for a tracker like you showed (usually because I dont care "exactly exactly" how I went to places but rather at which time I have been at which place)

Are you thinking of a mobile app or something else, like fully separate hardware you'd carry around? Sounds interesting

No I am just thinking of an App. The Apps which exist (as far as I have found them, if there are better apps I would be glad for recommendations) are either:

  • "fitness/running" trackers
  • unmaintained
  • still use the Google location service
  • use a self hosted server to store your data
  • don't have a built in map viewer to see your history

A modern replacement for OpenScan. It's workable, but some features don't work on Modern Android, and a good Scanner app is probably something most people could use. Could look at Adobe Scan and Office Lens for feature inspiration.

Yeah office lens is pretty much unbeatable. Open source would be amazing, but I at one point had about 6 document scanners on my phone and none of them held a candle to lens...

Microsoft is shit, but they have 2 apps that are not exploitative and are very great to use

Authenticator and Lens. They don't ask for any permissions that they don't need. They don't even require Microsoft account log in to work. They also have no ads, subscription, or premium prompts. Lens just requests files and camera. No location, no tracking, no cloud needed. It can simply be all local document scanning with great filtering,

Authenticator can be used with only camera permissions and it also it able to to push auth with key pairs, a step above general TOTP (though I still use everything with Aegis outside of work).

Not enshittified. Yet...

Obsidian.

Is the obsidian Android App not open source? I thought all their stuff was. Kinda embarrassed I never checked.

Nah they use "an open standard" being just markdown files or something, but the apps are still proprietary as far as I'm aware

I really hate how I sometimes, though rarely, see Obsidian talked about as if it were open source just because it uses an open standard

Like Photoshop isn't open source because it can use PNG kinda thing

There is already an opensource alternative to Obsidian, its name is #Logseq, you have mobile and desktop app

Logseq uses a bit of a different paradigm though. It is cool, but I wouldn't say it's a drop in replacement.

I'm sorry, I don't have any specific suggestions for you, but I am wondering: is there no open source app you yourself wish existed because you would need it?

Working on an open source app because some else (and not you) needs it, is not a good way of staying engaged and caring about the solution. Being the user and target of a project yourself is usually a much netter way of caring and proposing something tailored to at least one individual, maybe more.

Of course, if you are looking for a programming exercise, go for it, but then you don't need ideas, you can reimplement something which already exists, perhaps which you like, but in your own way. But if you want to have an impact in the open source, it starts by needing something which you don't really find anywhere and taking matter in your own hands to fix it :) this is not meant to disincentivize you, quite the opposite! I hope you stay attentive to your digital ecosystem to see which holes can be plugged :)

I maintain a private list of ideas I just think of as I go about my day, of things I would like to write/create for myself and while I won't be going through with all of them, I hope to be able to pick up one or several of them whenever I have time. I can through some ideas here, not as a hint that you should do it (I'll probably do them myself regardless), but just to inspire you, maybe:

  • I am subscribed to a teachable program which has no app and the program is just static information. I want to pull it all and represent it to me offline, not requiring internet to manage my progress. It is also intended to help me archive what I paid for and not depend on the goodwill of teachables to allow me to continue access the resource.
  • an RSS feed manager which uses embeddings to automatically organise the content by topic rather than by source.
  • an anki plugin to highlight content in the browser based on words from anki that I have and have not learned, to improve my language learning and reading ability.

I have a few more, but this should give you some hints, I hope! Good luck!

Nice question, you've got a lot of answers, most being major projects outside the scope of an individual, still, interesting pain points.

May I suggest you edit your OP with a list of viable options for individual devs or small teams to try ?

There's lots of FOSS music players, but none of them have a volume slider / preamp. The Android volume slider is always either too loud or quiet so I have to make fine adjustments using the preamp in JetAudio. If someone could add that to an existing music player that'd be cool.

And one that could handle a decent sized library (10s of thousands). One of the few places I'm happy to pay for it, Poweramp will let you buy a licence without google services. If you've already bought it and are on GrapheneOS you can enable play services for (3?) days and it stays good after you disable play services. I seldom shill, but here we are...

You can do this in VLC, though it's not very practical. VLC's equalizer has a preamp slider, it's just not great if you want to change it all the time.

A video editor...

Is Kdenlive no good? Always heard good things, but I don't use those kinds of software.

Kdenlive is a desktop app, not an android one, that the OP is asking for. Regardless, kdenlive crashes easily, has no hardware acceleration, and it doesn't have good color grading tools (particularly in regards to film emulation, which is what most people want to do artistic videos -- I used to shoot music videos). For basic videos, it's ok.

I think an open-source general device benchmark would be cool. Including CPU / GPU / Battery life metrics. As far as I know, everything that does this is proprietary.

Allowing manufacturers to know how a benchmark is performed also allows them to more easily artificially cheat when they know the benchmark is running.

That's a good point, but I don't figure this theoretical application would be big enough for any manufacturer to care about. I just wanted something for the people :⁠-⁠)

Support for all the hardware so we can quit using garbage Google-provided Android on every single phone instead of just the half-dozen or so phones some of these Free Android builds support. Amazing that I can install Linux on every single freaking configuration of PC that's ever existed with a very tiny amount of systems not having support for all of its hardware even if said hardware has never been freed or even officially documented, but not with phones.

The damn things will still be a privacy nightmare because your cell signal tracks you everywhere you go, but at least we'd have a Free OS for everyone's phone.

A nutrition tracker where you can enter what foods you eat into a small database. And then when you eat meals you can check those foods off in order to calculate all of the nutrition facts consumption per day. And it could be expanded even further by adding graphs and reports such as Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly.

Could track Calories, Vitamins, Minerals, and other specific nutrition stats. Most nutrition apps I've seen only track Calories... Or don't have accurate nutrition applied to specific foods as it is generic. Letting the user add the food as a item in a small database would give the user more control of how the stats and reports are calculated.

Could be helpful for some to see their intake and then figure out ways to change it to become healthier.

Isn't this literally what Waistline is for Android? You create your own local food database (which you can automatically fetch info from Open Food Facts or USDA if desired, but not required) which lets you put in as many nutriments to track as you wish, all with graphs and information with different timelines.

No clue if there's anything like this for desktop.

Sooo, an open source Cronometer.

.. which is a really good app btw. Been using it for 10 years.

Also, export the graphs/reports to PDF, or something easy to pass to a doctor.

Maybe a dev can take inspiration from the Yuka app. To their credit, they have put together a great database for scanning foods and comparing ingredients, as well as offering understand of the possible risks of those ingredients.

Any image/video editor in Android. I've been trying Image Toolbox, but sometimes it doesn't work or crashes :(

The Transit app, used for bus/train route info and buying tickets. I imagine the ticket buying part would be difficult to OS, but I just want the live transit routing info. A few apps exist for other cities, but not mine. Worst part is Transit relies on Google Maps.

I believe google maps pulls its data from municipalities setting up and streaming realtime data using this: https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs-realtime

For my city, I was able to pull this GTFS data into my home automation system to show next arrival times for a couple of convenient stops near my home.

Yea, I've looked into how it works to see if I could add it to an existing app, but ran into a wall I can't recall right now.

The local stops would be good, but what I really need is the ability to figure out new routes, like visiting a friend.

Oh yeah, then you definitely need something else to take the transit schedule and realtime updates to plan routes for you.

I don't use it much since I've already got it active on the apps I wanted it for, but on Samsung's Galaxy Store there is an app I've never found an alternative to anywhere from my limited searching: Sound Assistant.

On desktop/laptop, turning off individual app/program sounds is super easy, but this is literally the only app I've ever seen that allows you to turn off the sound for individual apps on android. Don't know if other versions of android from other brands or android 14 has that feature natively, but it's a feature I wish was native to all versions of android regardless of which large brand has made their own alterations to android.

A minor problem, though, as I assume most people probably don't give a rats ass about this.

There are a few Magisk modules for this. This isn't something that is possible without root or owning a Samsung phone

Make an Android app for Redlib please :)

WhatsApp

Matrix!

No, I'm not looking for an alternative. I'm looking for an open source client that let's me talk to folks on WhatsApp.

ah, hopefully with the Digital Markets Act in the EU, reliable bridging to Matrix with E2EE intact will come quickly. You can already bridge (e.g. I run mautrix-whatsapp), but its not in an ideal state

Even with a matrix bridge, you still have to run WhatsApp -- the official closed source client. It doesn't solve that problem

I want a way to not have to run closed source software to communicate with users on WhatsApp

Yup, that's what DMA should solve (edit: or, rather, will solve, when Whatsapp fully complies with it)

A closer analogy would be XMPP since that's what whatsapp is based on.

The best open source client for it is Conversations for Android ($0 on F-Droid, $3 on google play except during christmas when it's $0)

depends what you mean by closer -- by features and ease of use, Matrix is the closest you can get to Whatsapp right now. XMPP is good, though!

What I mean by closer is code-wise. On the backend, WhatsApp literally uses XMPP. The big difference is that WhatsApp also has a few proprietary plugins, and a singular client that uses these and hides away the fact that it's all XMPP.

That’s why it’s less janky & doesn’t take minutes to join a room unlike Matrix. WhatsApp to the XTENSIBLE part of XMPP & extended it in a proprietary direction, but at least you have the option to easily do so with XML.

I don’t know what Matrix is giving users other than the eventual consistency model of chat, but most users don’t need the entire chat history of everything—you could argue it is an anti-feature that makes self-hosting too expensive in comparison & also leads to chat overuse/abuse ala Slack/Telegram/Discord where folks treat it as a forum that you can barely search when you have an account while being authenticated & where messages/topics get easily lost. For instance, you can replace an ’announcements room’ with a Atom feed.

Matrix is kinda janky and unstable

I've been using it as my only form of messaging with most of my contacts for several years, many of whom have little knowledge of technology. It's really not.

What about signal?

The signal app does not let me send messages to WhatsApp users.

Use the web app version then

The web app version requires you to install the nonfree app. This is circular logic.

Oh I didn't know it couldn't work without the app. Nvm then

Yeah and not just once. Iirc if their proprietary, closed-source app doesnt call home to their mother ship at least every 2 weeks, then all your WhatsApp Web sessions get deauth'd.

We really need a way to use WhatsApp without using the original spyware app.

Well even if someone creates it, it will still act like a web session. It will just be a frontend. You can't create a separate app with authentication and everything because it's proprietary (so you can't see how authentication works) and messages are E2EE

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Signal I suppose would be the closest analog

No, I'm not looking for an alternative. I'm looking for an open source client that let's me talk to folks on WhatsApp.

I see, fair enough. I don't know if you'll have any luck with a FOSS third party client which does t violate their TOS. There was something on fdroid years ago, a wrapper that effectively allowed you to use WhatsApp Web on another phone (or perhaps even the same one), but it ultimately requried the use of the official clients

If you use one of those WhatsApp web apps, you still have to use the closed source app. It doesn't solve the problem

Yes, I already aluded to this. Point being, I don't think you'll find a viable FOSS front end since it would violate their TOS.

Most people don't care about violating ToS. Its not a risk to an open source project.

It is to

A: the continuity of said project (DMCA) and B: to the individual end users.

You can use FOSS clients for things like Discord or the Google play store but you still run the risk of getting banned.

Shit, I get banned by their shitty ML algos when I do comply with their ToS. I don't think most people care about the risk of having to create new accounts, since they're already forced to do so already.

Ordinarily I'd agree, but for now, WhatsApp is tied to your phone number. I'm not sure if you can use some kind of service to create alias numbers but for many people, that's a big blocker when it comes to making another account following any kind of infraction.

I don't think meta would shift in requiring a phone number per account either,

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This and so many others that are irreplaceable because of the Network effect. Google Maps, Uber and so on...

However if you are looking for a self contained app to bring into the Foss ecosystem then I would recommend making a game that you like?

My first game that I bought on Google Play was Osmos making a version of this that is open source would make me happy....

Edit: someones already mentioned these below... nevermind!

If youre in the EU then EU parliament forced whatsapp to start developing cross-app communications with Signal, telegram etc. (Source). This was in 2022 and was due to be released in March 2024. Im not sure where it got to though since i dont use whatsapp, though i might start asking some friends to see if its rolled out.

Alternatively there are "matrix bridges". Namely via Matrix which can link messaging apps through matrix accounts and send messages between

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I can't find an equivalent replacement for Musicolet. There are plenty of open source music players out there for Android that just don't have the little features that Musicolet does. Such as multiple queues, lyric editing, metadata editing, format conversions, stop after the track finishes, easily reorder songs and clear queues, etc.

KineStop - After Apple announcef Motion Cues, I went looking on Android because I cannot use my devices in a moving vehicle. KineStop is all I found. I went ahead and bought it because it helps (doesn't completely get rid of motion sickness). I would gladly switch to an open source alternative if one were available.

Fitbod, a fitness app that monitored my progress and health data and auto generated appropriate workouts taking muscle group fatigue into consideration

Komoot and strava... General route planning and teavkinv software..

I want to crop screenshots easily :(

Check "Image Toolbox" on fdroid

Thx but it is not as fast as "markup" or huawei's screenshot tool. You need multiple steps in order to crop a simple image.

What android OS do you use? On stock Android 14 (GrapheneOS, but it's not a GOS feature) this functionality is built into the stock screenshot tool.

pwr+voldown -> tap screenshot that appears in the overlay after you take it -> tap the crop tool . I suppose step three could be removed but what if you want to do something that isn't cropping? There are lots of other features so at some point you have to tell the tool what you want to do.

Grapheneos. Do you mean "markup"? Look in the "apps" app for it. It's a proprietary app by google

No, I don't have markup installed (it is there in apps but not installed from the mirror).

I think in my case the screenshot functionality is built into AOSP and the editor you get when tapping the resulting preview overlay in the lower left corner of the screen is part of the "gallery" app since using the "edit" feature from gallery launches the same editor. Maybe GrapheneOS just sets that as the default editor, I'm not sure.

Which gallery are you using? fossify?

AOSP gallery that comes with GrapheneOS. The app info says it's called com.android.gallery3d. There's some info here in the docs about the relationship between camera, edit functions, and the gallery app.

Thx.

It currently opens an external editor activity for the edit action.

I don't have a dedicated gallery app or editor installed. I can't find anything in apps either besides markup. Maybe my installation is too old.

"Pixels" mood tracker. I love it but I also love self-hosting all my services.

I was going to write "a decent comic reader", but I've recently discovered Kotatsu and it has literally changed my life.

Is it better than Mihon?

haven't tested truthfully, I just see no reason to change from it

Mihon seems good in case you were using Tachiyomi since you can import the library

There is an IOS app for hot air balloon pilots called "Hot Air". There is a similar app for Android that... Leaves much to be desired.

There's several functions that are needed. First, we need a map. We need to be able to enter waypoints and/or polygons charting landing zones, prohibited zones, targets, etc. we need an easy way to select targets, and our bearing and distance to those targets.

For planning purposes, we need a bearing line that we can place and move on that map. We need to be able to easily drag and drop each end of the line, and get the bearing and distance between the endpoints.

Next, we need track recording. It should record a ground track during flight, preferably with altitude information, and notes about the flight.

Next, a wind map. The wind speed and direction varies considerably by altitude. It needs to record direction and speed as we climb and descend, telling us what altitude has winds favorable for our current target.

Bonus points if we can prepopulate that wind map with data from a "pibal" (pilot balloon; a simple latex party balloon released and tracked with compass and stopwatch before a flight)

Next, coordination with other pilots and ground crews. 3D location sharing between participants; wind map data shared between pilots.

I support this just because it's something so niche that I believe you balloon people deserve it. I feel like we all with our own requests for media players and readers and launchers and messengers have at least a couple usable options and tons of options that may require getting used to or some compromise, but are there. But an app for balloon pilots? There's something that probably is in dire need of something else.

Something that comes up a lot but probably can't be made open source is a wallet app. But if we ignore the payments part, Google wallet has some really nice features when dealing with plane tickets which I'd love to see in a standalone open source app.

A lightweight office suit

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-office-android-ios/

Can this be considered lightweight? not complaining, just curious

I'd argue no office suite is lightweight by design. If lightweight is important you should use markdown or LaTeX

I can't wake up or a similar app.

I would've wanted an alarm clock app with 'tasks' you need to do before turning it off.

I know about one app that requires you to solve math questions. I want all the *other* tasks.

Would like to get an effective metadata eraser, this one is pretty good https://f-droid.org/packages/com.jarsilio.android.scrambledeggsif/ but cannot saved to device, that's really awful... If you could get something as strong as this and saved it to device that would be pretty nice

Have you tried ImagePipe?

If you're interested in something that doesn't even exist, and should be more-or-less straightforward:

Music/podcast app that will accept VST plugins (there are many FOSS ones, as well as non-FOSS ones) so that we can compress/limit the sound range on podcasts while in the car. Or even a built-in compressor/limiter that's based on FOSS compressors.

I was listening to a hysterical podcast episode between three people, but one of mics was way louder than the other two. I had to take it into Pro Tools and fix it myself before listening to it.

There are apps that allow EQ, but none that do actual compression, from what I can tell.

The ability to automatically detect commercials (via sound level / machine learning) and skip them would be amazing as well. There's an app for iOS that does this, but nothing for Android.

I don't have any idea of how conplicated it would be, but a phone app would be a nice option. The stock dialer that comes with FOSS ROMs is OK functionally, but visually looks like it was from 2010. Plus it's not available through F-droid or other open source app store. Koler is the only serious dialer alternative I've seen, and while it looks nice it has always been super buggy.

I'm thinking of this too. I heard there's only one good alternative dialer app (don't remember if it was Koler or not). We have a lot of FOSS SMS apps but no dialer ones for some reason

Have you tried the fossify dialer?

Their whole set of apps is nice.

I tried it back when it was under the simple tools developer. I couldn't get in to his apps (aside from the calendar) for some reason. They all felt half-baked. It's nice to see that the fossify forks are getting some love, I'll check it out again.

I like the fossify forks much better than the simple tools, I used to only use the gallery (and even for that I switched to Aves) now I have many of them as default. Dialer is nice, though the integration could flow better.

I've been using Emerald Dialer for a good six months now and I love it.

I've tried it, but I am a little picky about UI personally. It functioned well while I used it, but had a very dated style. Totally a cosmetic issue though.

SMS Backup & Restore? Unless there is an alternative that I'm missing? Play store link

https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.tmo1.sms_ie/

I saw this but its missing a key feature: daily backups. SMS Backup & Restore can make a backup every day then I can sync the file out to Nextcloud or similar. It also supports Dropbox if that's your thing.

Yeah, that's fair. It's the only open-source SMS Backup app I could find.

I am so sorry! I took another look at SMS Import / Export and to my surprise it does support scheduled backups! I had seen it before and had overlooked that feature so disqualified it. I'm going to test it now but if you don't hear back its probably because I made the switch without issue.

Sailforms Android app!

https://groups.google.com/g/sailforms-users

Use like 12 years for keeping track of lots of personal stuff. It's a generic database / table / forms app that's very powerfull. Buttons, queries, reports, calculated fields etc.

But: the app developer stopped despite a rather enthusiastic community. Now it isn't even on the Play Store anymore and I guess everybody must have an exit strategy.

Xplore file browser

It's trivial to replace the independent pieces of xplore, but it has so many features in one app that I just can't let it go. It's got dual pane file browsing, disk usage chart, smb, ftp, and many other cloud storage connections. It also handles many types of compression.

It's become my main offline music player as well, because it has the simple ability to shuffle a folder of music, which is all I really need.

It can also view installed apps, export them to apk, and view and modify appdata (as non root!).

I would really want to have a really good open source SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) app, with good secure key management and excellent transfer performance. So far, I haven't found any such app.

An equivalent to iOS Shortcuts for Android and Linux.

Don’t any linux DE have something like a shortcuts app?

Maybe, but the thing that makes iOS Shortcuts so great is that it basically offers an extensive GUI to interact with all of the system's APIs.

FLOSS Shazam? I really love discovering music when I travel, but I see no open source version of it.

Just an open source frontend for Shazam, but Audire is pretty nice for this

Readably

No RSS reader is quite like it.

Synfonium

Best music player out there.

Why is there not an app that tells you which grocery stores have the best prices? I should be able to give it a list and it'll tell me where to buy each item.

Because grocery stores don't make that data accessible to third party developers, otherwise someone would do what you're suggesting and they'd risk you shopping elsewhere.

Bah, the data is on their websites, figure out how to collect it.

Go ahead and try scraping an arbitrary list of sites without an API and let me know how that goes. It would be a constant maintenance headache, especially if you're talking about anything other than the larger chains that have fairly standardized sites

I bet an AI could do it

@Dogyote @Zetaphor

I've been webscraping in my job for 6 years. Yes, it's a constant headache, they keep updating their sites and improving their antibot protections. But it can be done and some companies are doing it (on a biiiiig scale). It's just not very realistic that an open-source project would be able to invest that much effort into all the updates. Well some do, youtube-dl is basically webscraping and they are pretty up-to-date. It's just very rare.

@Dogyote @Zetaphor

And we also explored the AI option, it always turned out unrealistic. Either you would have to scrape the content and send it to the AI to parse the info, but then you'd be paying for every scrape, or run a powerful rig nonstop, but the results would still be hit and miss. Or you might let the AI generate the code for the scraping module, still not ideal, they were constantly hallucinating things that weren't there.

I'd be happy if Voiply would just work without GMS and could be downloaded from F-droid.

It’s not an Android app but ServerCat is the best multi device monitoring/ssh software for mobile that I’ve come across. Sadly none of the alternatives on iOS or Android compare. Totally room for a proper competitor that fits a lot of information in an intuitive and clean ui.

This is not an answer to your question, but I would love if somebody would make InputStick software for platforms other than android if possible

File Explorer

I haven't checked in a while, but I am still using CX File Explorer because I didn't find a FOSS alternative I like. Maybe it is just because I am used to it, but one thing I really like is the network feature that you can access local shares of a NAS.

Have you tried Material Files (it's on fdroid)? It's genuinely great and it supports different remote protocols, although I haven't personally tried this feature.

Honestly I feel like good mobile file managers are just like impossible with the small screen size. I just do everything from termux

I don't have any suggestions. I can't think of any proprietary app good enough that I'd give up control of my computing for. However, consider objective requirements rather than subjective terms like good. What do you use the proprietary app for, why are existing free alternatives not sufficient, and can a free app be made that satisfies those requirements?

@federino
I would like to request a feature vor my prefered gallary app Aves.
I would like to have a protocol agnostic tool for Offline files.
I wish to work with my Images storred on a Server at home. It would be nice if I could Sync files with it and descide if an Image should be storred localy or only on server.

Storrage agnostic means, that i'm able to use either other saf integrations or been able to etablish a connection inside aves to smb or ssh-ftp.

I miss such an app also for my Linux laptop. Currently, such a way of managing files currently exist only on Windows ( OneDrive, Dropbox)

okay, honestly: a dating app yes there are a couple foss ones, but basically no one uses them and their ux is horrible